The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (11 page)

She stepped out onto the deck which overlooked the backyard, sloping gently downward, totally enclosed by trees and bamboo and viburnum. Otis’s shed, in the far corner of the yard, was always locked. She couldn’t see Wilson anywhere. She called his name a few times. “Dad! Wilson! Dad!” Nothing.

Her heart was beating fast now, painful adrenaline pumping through her like it did when one of her children had wandered off. She walked back through the house again, yelling Wilson’s name, through
the front yard and then up and down their block of Friar’s Way, calling for him. There was nobody about, nobody that she could question. Should she start knocking on doors? He could be anywhere by now. Should she get in the car and start looking that way? She needed help. Vic wouldn’t answer his phone. Ava was at Asperger’s support group. Otis would be home from work soon, but she couldn’t wait for him.

She trotted back home and, in the kitchen, Parson panting beside her, called the police. She’d just finished up giving her report, fighting back panic, when Wilson and Otis, in his McDonald’s uniform, stepped in through the back door.

Wilson, red-faced under his brown safari hat, strands of his white hair pasted to his forehead, looked on the verge of heatstroke.

“Never mind,” she told the woman on the phone and hung up. “Where have you been?” Caroline removed his hat, got him situated in a chair, and made him drink a glass of water.

“Hot as hell in there,” he said.

“In where?”

“In my shed.” Otis slapped his grandfather on the shoulder as if he were a naughty little rascal. “I heard him rattling the door, trying to get out.”

“He must’ve locked himself in,” Caroline suggested. “Did you give him a key?” Wilson had been advising Otis on his current project, whatever it was. They’d been science pals for years.

“It was unlocked,” Wilson said.

Otis shook his head. “No, sir. I always keep it locked. There’s a key hidden out there, but he doesn’t know where it is.
Nobody’s
allowed in there but me.”

Caroline sank into a kitchen chair.

“I didn’t
want
to go in there,” Wilson said. “She made me.”

“Who made you?” Caroline asked, but she knew the answer.

“The padlock was locked from the
outside,
” Otis said. “He couldn’t have done it.”

“That woman,” Wilson said. “That strange woman. She pushed me in there and locked the door.”

Caroline found herself wanting, horribly, to giggle, the way she had when they were attempting the crossword puzzle. “Why would she do that, Dad?”

“I damn near suffocated in there. Couldn’t get the windows open.”

“He shouldn’t be in there,” Otis said to his mother in a scolding tone. “There’s dangerous chemicals in there.”

“What chemicals?”

He took a few steps away from her. “Just my stuff. I know what I’m doing. But if you’re in there, you need protection.”

“Protection,” Caroline repeated, and thought of birth control, which brought the giggles back up to the surface. She forced them down again.

“She hates me, for some reason,” Wilson said.

“She doesn’t hate you,” Caroline said. “Why would she hate you? I’m sure it was an accident. You need to go lie down for a while.”

So I can call Billie and give her an update, she finished silently.

She hated the Asswiper Support Group, but her mother dropped her off at the Methodist Church downtown at one o’clock every Saturday afternoon. The Asswipers met in a dank basement that had one of those floors covered with tan linoleum squares that had been there since the dawn of time, or since the 1950s, and there were black scuff marks all over the floor that Ava stared at while the other people were talking—the guys were talking, because it was only her and a bunch of losers.

She didn’t like looking at the guys, noticing all their facial irregularities—it was better to stare at the scuff marks on the floor and try to see pictures in them. Each week she made sure to sit in the same chair so that she could revisit the scuff mark pictures she’d already conjured up. There was the clipper ship she’d christened the
Ordinary
, and there was the tree of life she’d noticed for the first time last week, and over there the state of California, and right in front of her a profile of Elvis, the 1968 comeback Elvis, with sideburns and thin face.

Ava had seen the face of Elvis in the marbled swirls of a shower stall in a Super 8 Motel, in the clouds, in a half-used bar of olive soap from the Italian deli. Hang in there, Ava baby, he was always telling her, things
will
get better. He understood, because he had Asperger’s, too, only he’d grown up in the good old days before people even knew what Asperger’s was, so it was more of a live-and-let-live kind of a thing,
instead of a live-and-try-to-fix-the-other-guy kind of a thing. Back then, you were just labeled a freak and left alone, which really wasn’t ideal either, she had to admit, unless you also happened to be a gorgeous musical genius. Hello there, Elvis. She tapped his chin with the toe of her flip-flop. Hey, Elvis. Hey, guitar man.

One time she’d mentioned to the freaks in her group that, in her opinion, Elvis had Asperger’s, and the only response she’d gotten was the most gung ho Christian guy going, “Rock and Roll music is sinful. The beat is meant to make you think of the sexual act. The phrase
rock and roll
is actually a euphemism for the sexual act. Even Christian rock isn’t wholesome. Doesn’t matter that the lyrics are about God.” What could you say to this kind of nonsense? For somebody who was so against sex, he sure liked to talk about it a lot. Sexual act. Why add the
act
part?

And over there, by the group leader’s Teva sandal, plain as day, was the Eiffel Tower with Madeline and Miss Clavel and the row of girls in two straight lines. In two straight lines they ate their bread, brushed their teeth, and went to bed. An ideal life for someone with Asperger’s. Ava had always wanted to be Madeline, an orphan who lived in a cool old house with a solid unvarying routine, some built-in friends, and a nice old lady who was not your mother, like Nance.

Ava would’ve given anything to see a row of girls about then, because the guys in the support group were the most peculiar bunch of guys ever assembled in one room. They were mostly old and scary, not one potential boyfriend in the bunch. This week, though, there was a new guy there, baby faced, about her age, who said his name was Travis and that he didn’t have Asperger’s but that his mom had wanted him to come check out the group. Interesting! A non-Aspie, not bad looking, who wanted to check them out! She wanted him to say more, but the other guys wouldn’t let him get another word in. Their voices droned on.

“Those Aspies are so repulsive,” she’d complained to her mother once, who told her that it wasn’t very nice to say things like that, and that she should give them a chance, and that every man wasn’t going to look like Elvis, so she’d better face reality. She’d insisted that Ava join this group to improve her social skills—what a laugh. This group was the blind leading the blind.

So here she was, facing reality, and right now reality was the tall, hawk-faced Christian dude talking about his CD collection. His glasses hung unevenly on his face, one side lower than the other. She’d pointed this fact out to him once, and he’d told her that one of his ears was higher than the other. “There’s a real disparity in terms of how many recorded minutes there are on different kinds of albums,” he told the group. “There are twenty-two minutes on average for secular sound tracks and only fifteen for Christian music.” He made this statement in the same flat voice he made every statement.

The rest of the guys in the group—there were six of them—didn’t really listen to one another, but waited for a pause in the speeches to give their own. They were supposed to be learning conversational skills, but what they were doing wasn’t having conversations. They were taking turns holding forth.

The man with the beard complained that Christian bookstores didn’t carry any Christian computer games.

Then the group leader, the Teva sandals guy with the kooky name—Sumpter—started in about how Northern milk is better than Southern milk because Northern cows have different digestive systems.

What Ava wanted, more than anything, was to find true love.

So far she hadn’t had any luck on this front. Sometimes she went out on a date or two or even three with some “typical” guy, and she’d get all panicked and excited and ask her mother, and even Suzi, for advice about what to wear. But after a few dates the boy would start backing away, and her mother told her that it was probably because
of her Asperger’s. According to her mother, who grilled her after every date, Ava did everything wrong. She smiled too much. Either stared too intensely or wouldn’t make eye contact. Began pacing and twiddling her fingers. Stiffened up when she should’ve been cuddly or made awkward, sloppy physical overtures out of nowhere. Talked about mundane, unrelated subjects in an overpersistent way—the albums of Elvis Presley or the health benefits of eating walnuts, for example—and failed to ask questions of her dates or interrupted them when they were talking.

Her mother had it all figured out; and she always emphasized that it wasn’t Ava’s fault. The typical young men just didn’t understand, her mother explained to her, that Ava didn’t have the inner resources to think much about other people when she was nervous, not because she didn’t care, but because she was focusing very hard about how she was supposed to behave, which caused her to come across as either strange and wooden or as strange and random. Like her mother’s explanation would make her feel better. Her mother always seemed relieved that things hadn’t gone well. She didn’t really want a boy to fall in love with Ava. Ava’s mother had married young, when she and Ava’s father were still in college, but she didn’t want that for Ava. She wanted Ava to live at home for the rest of her life.

It looked like her mother might get her wish, because any normal boy who showed interest in Ava would soon drift away, never giving her any satisfactory explanation as to why, but leaving her feeling that she’d failed yet again, that she would always fail because she was defective. Even though she was pretty! Everyone said so.

“I’m going to be on
America’s Next Top Model,
” Ava announced, interrupting the guy who was mumbling about movie popcorn and how bad it was for you. There was silence. The coffeepot in the corner hissed and sputtered and stank. All the men, with their hairy nostrils and asymmetrical eyes, were looking at her, not into her eyes but at
parts of her—her breasts, her bare toes, her hair—and not saying anything. The new guy, Travis, the tall guy with fat cheeks, was staring at her mostly bare legs. Probably none of them cared about what she was saying, but they were making a space for her, which, for them, was something.

“I made a new friend,” she explained. She didn’t need to tell them that her new friend was seventy-seven. “She’s going to get me on that show. I’m going to win the contest and get a contract to be, like, a cover girl.”

“There aren’t enough healthy food options at movie theaters,” said hawk beak.

“You’re pretty enough to be a model,” Travis said to her right knee. His side bangs hid one of his big brown eyes. “You could win that contest.”

“Those reality shows are all scripted,” said Sumpter, their self-appointed group leader, gazing sternly above her head. “It’s not a real contest.”

Ava felt she was being assaulted. Put on the spot. Their words felt like needles prickling her skin. She hoped they would shut up before she had to tell them to shut up.

“Do you want to go to the movies sometime?” Travis asked her now, in front of everyone.

“I don’t know.” Ava pulled her sweatshirt hood up over her head. It was always freezing cold in the basement, and the folding chair seats felt like blocks of ice.

“That’s not appropriate, Travis,” said Sumpter, as if he knew the meaning of the word
appropriate
. He thought he was more well-adjusted than the rest of them because he had a real job—even though it was a crummy job, doing something with computers, the kind of job Ava would never want in a million years. Sumpter was afraid of anyone in authority. Any parent, teacher, and especially God himself, had to be
consulted and obeyed. These guys were all big on God. “Does your mother know that you’re applying to be on
America’s Next Top Model
?” Sumpter asked Ava.

“I told you, I have a friend who’s helping me,” Ava said. “Nance. She’s like my grandmother. It’s just between me and her.”

“Ava is old enough to do what she wants,” Travis said, and gave Ava a sweet little smile.

“How do you get to be on that show?” the guy with watery eyes asked her.

“You have to apply, send in pictures, all that. I don’t have pictures. Nance’s going to help me get them.”

“Pictures like that are really expensive,” Sumpter said. “My mother used to be on TV commercials. She was on one for Lemon Pledge. You have to get like a whole book of pictures in different poses.”

“Nance is going to pay for them,” Ava said. She felt elated. They were actually having a conversation for once, a conversation that included her. True, they were asking her challenging questions, putting her on the spot, which she usually hated, but at least they were paying attention to her.